Digital Fluency Intensive Session 2

Kia ora!

Today was session two for our DFI course. I didn't think I could learn any more gobsmacking things than I did in session one but session two has proven me wrong! Today was great.

We learned lots about Google Hangouts (and how very appropriate they may be at the moment). We learned about the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy, through the learn part (of LCS). Via Google Hangouts we discussed Learn (ako) and effective teaching to provide accelerated learning. We looked at the goals of the cluster. The summary I took was that whatever our children learn our teachers learn too. As teachers, we need to use this learning as we carry out our role in the classroom. We take the evidence we are presented (WF)and make deliberate and effective use from it.

The current gaps identified by WF research are stated below.

RECOGNISE

-What is effective practice?

AMPLIFY

-A professional blog, creating a site and sharing resources is amplifying by giving your thoughts to the world.

TURBOCHARGE

-Take new technologies and turbocharge the way we teach. New things that were never possible before (relates to SAMR model).

To improve our workflow and capability as teachers we looked at Google Hangouts.

These provide us with the ability to hold remote meetings, video calling and screen sharing. We discussed etiquette (feedback using headphones, group calling etc, make sure your mic is off). This tool will be useful if we need to teach from home and/or using in the class for learning purposes.

We looked at Google Keep which provides us with reminders like a notepad. You can even set reminders and bells! I will definitely be using the 'Grab image text' option on Google Keep to create cloze activities for reading with known texts!

To help with my personal life, we looked at calendars and Gmail (shortcuts and organisation). Things I will do are; add google site to my email signature. I also favourited my email inbox count. This saves me having to open to ‘check’ emails all the time.


I will also utilize the 'schedule send option'. We also looked at 'One Tab' and 'Toby Mini'. Both of these extensions save groups of tabs that you frequently open, another time saver! I think 'Toby Mini's more user friendly and in my opinion- is prettier.

Digital Fluency Intensive Session 1

Kia ora team,

Today we had our first DFI course with Dorothy and Kelsey from Manaiakalani. In my first year of teaching (years 4-6) I gathered a good understanding of Chromebooks and blogging. I was able to learn through Cybermsart with Kelsey ways to teach my students how to use their Chromebooks and their blogs. But I was looking forward to learning new things this year. This year I am teaching in a year 3/4 space where the year 3s are on the ipads and the year 4s are on the Chromebooks.

Take a look at my Screenshot below of everything that I learned on the first day. One thing that I believe has improved my digital fluency and confidence is the use of Google Groups. This allows to streamline our communication throughout the course. Emails from our group leaders and ourselves can be sent via email or posted in our DFI Google Group. This can easily be lost on an email thread especially if there are a large number of emails back and forth. By accessing the Google Group this will allow me to find what I had been missing to avoid confusion. Google Groups can be set up for colleagues, but not my students.

One thing I learned that will be useful for my learners is using the voice typing tool. This will allow me to engage my reluctant writers as this it allows children to record their voice and the text comes up on the doc. The children can then read it back to see if it makes sense and add changes or errors where necessary. As well as this when it comes to a lesson when children need to access a Google Doc, it is important to get them to label their docs with their initials and whatever it is. This makes it easier to look at tabs bar and at all names (e.g. LG Sandpit time). It would be worthwhile to use Hapara as children are doing this. Display it on TV giving positive praise of those who are doing this. Reward those who do it first. Don’t move on until Hapara is full.

I learned how to better organise my Google Drive which in turn will allow me to improve my workflow in my personal life. We did this by setting up user profiles, our bookmarks bar and learning some tips and tricks.

Hope you enjoyed reading. Until next time!